The Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing brings together academics, writers, and research students with interdisciplinary interests in the relations between 20th and 21st-century writing and contemporary culture in all its forms.

Members

Over the last couple of years I’ve co-directed a creative documentary feature film, The New Man, and published two books, Feeling Jewish (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke (Profile Books), and I’m still very interested in feelings and their absence, humour and humorlessness, film, documentary, psychoanalysis, trauma, Jewishness, religion, hermeneutics, ethics, life writing, essaying, and postwar American writing. Recently, I’ve written an essay for Granta on Grace Paley after #TimesUp and a short article for the Financial Times about being British and Jewish right now. I also have a small role in a new film, Female Human Animal, reviewed here and here.

Kevin Brazil’s research focuses on the relationship between the novel and visual art and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and on modernism and its relationship to the present. He is also interested in the longer history and theory of the novel, especially the genre of the historical novel, and the relationship of the novel to time.

I am a writer working in fiction, both the short story and the novel, as well as creative non-fiction. I am particularly interested in fiction that delves into other disciplines, and the intersection of the personal with the political. I am also co-curator on on-going project, “Imagistic,” in which writers respond to image with flash fiction or poetry.

Dr Alireza Fakhrkonandeh is a Lecturer in Modern and contemporary Drama and Theatre Studies. Alireza is a Howard Barker specialist. He has written and published two monographs and numerous research articles on Barker’s work. His research and teaching, however, focus more largely on almost all aspects of Modern and Contemporary drama and theatre in conjunction with philosophy of art and literature, medical humanities, and critical and literary theory. He is particularly interested in the philosophy of the body and the concomitant issues of somaesthetics, theories of consciousness, memory, and trauma. Concurrently with the preceding areas, Alireza has been developing both a module and a research project on World Dramas and Oil Studies with a particular focus on the Middle East. Alireza is also an established academic translator of literary and philosophical works.

Mary teaches 19th century literature and culture with a specialism in book history, and have particular research interests in the history of reading and the publication and circulation of Victorian and Edwardian popular texts. She welcomes applications for MPhil/PhD work on any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian literature, publishing history, and print culture. Mary is also the Founder and Director of the interdisciplinary Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research, in which postgraduates play a full and active part.

Sarah Hayden’s research focuses on the points of intersection between art and experimental writing. Recent projects include a book on avant-garde artisthood and American modernist and contemporary poetry (University of New Mexico Press) and a book (with Paul Hegarty) on the German 1960s artist, Peter Roehr (Snoeck/Daimler Art Collection), both of which came out in 2018. She is currently developing a new project on vocal interjections in gallery contexts.

My research/writing/curation/performance continues to be marine based with specific interests in shape-shifting whale/bird/animal/human cultures as expressed by human/natural histories in Southampton, the UK, Netherlands, New England, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, with a particular focus on queer nature, literature, art and physical immersion.

My research interests range across the literatures, cultures and histories of the Portuguese-speaking world and Africa more broadly, with a particular focus on themes relating to the body, including gender and sex, race, disability, violence, health, disease and mortality. A large part of my work is concerned with the critical theorisation of those themes, both within my regions of specialisation and beyond. My current focus is on how the triangulation of power, pathology and the body has been enacted in various African nations, and how it has been represented and resisted in textual and visual cultures. Of particular interest to me at the moment is how concepts of futurity and disability fit into this schema.

STEPHANIE JONESStephanie is interested in water in its many material and abstract forms. She is particularly curious about the place of the ocean in histories of ideas about justice, right, and obligation. Over the past few years, she has written about the relationship of poetry to maritime and imperial law; about islands in the colonial and postcolonial imagination; and about stories of privateering and piracy. She is currently writing a book about pirates.

My research interests are broad and include questions of identity, ‘race’, sexuality, gender and religion in twentieth century UK and beyond, looking at literature, film, radio and television. My current work explores the role and representation of Jews and Jewishness at the BBC from 1936-1979. This looks at the careers of significant individuals (for example, Ronald Waldman, Rudolph Cartier, Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert, Jeremy Isaacs, Brian Tesler and Paul Fox), alongside the analysis of the on-screen image of ‘the Jew’, Jews, Jewish culture and traditions, and Judaism. This involves working closely with the BBC’s Written Archives in Caversham. I am currently writing an article on the BBC and the Holocaust for a volume on Britain and the Holocaust. This will consider how BBC radio and television have engaged with the Holocaust and its legacy in the form of staffing, news reports, documentaries, dramas and magazine programmes. This will include case studies such as an analysis of the important but long-neglected radio play No Luggage, No Return (June 1943), the first on British radio to describe the deportation of Jews to Treblinka. I am CI on the Leverhulme Writing Places project and editor of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rhos20/current). Recent publications include a chapter on the East End, television and the documentary imagination, July 1939 for Migrant Britain: Histories and Historiographies: Essays in Honour of Colin Holmes, ed. Jennifer Craig-Norton, Christhard Hoffmann, and Tony Kushner (London: Routledge, 2018).

ALISON MARMONT

My project focuses on intersectional discrimination in France and in the novels of Linda Lê and Marie NDiaye, two contemporary French authors. With reference to Ahmed’s concept of ‘being-at-home’, I analyse how various spaces of belonging are constructed in France and in the texts and the impact of this on the embodied experiences of those deemed out-of-place because of their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age etc.

Nicky Marsh works on representations of finance in contemporary culture, her books include Show me the Money: the Image of Finance, Literature and Globalization; A Reader. She is currently working on the economies of gender.

Will May is drawn to poets that bother critics (Stevie Smith, F.T. Prince), and modes that bother poetry (whimsy). His published research has considered why composers and librettists disagree, how you fictionalise a pianist, when to doodle on a poem, whether the postwar is a literary category, and the dangers of eccentricity as a tradition. He talks about Stevie Smith now and again. Currently, he is writing a book on poetry and whimsy, and collaborating with SO:TO Speak on a series of workshops for local writers. Will May’s edition of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and Drawings is published in a new paperback edition by Faber on November 1st, 2018.

JOAN McGAVIN

My current interests include identity and memorialisation in contemporary poetry, and how to integrate researched, often historical, material into current poems. In my two previous poetry collections (from Oversteps Books) I touched on these themes, but they loom larger now. I taught Creative Writing for many years at university and adult education level, and continue to do workshops (for instance, one called ‘Face Facts’ at the forthcoming Hands-On Humanities Day of the Human Worlds Festival in November). I was Hampshire Poet 2014 and am a trustee of the Winchester Poetry Festival. I am interested in poems escaping the page and finding a home elsewhere: currently, for instance, I have a poem on display at the Anatomical Museum of the Edinburgh Medical School.

Peter Middleton has just assembled a collection of previously published and new essays, provisionally entitled Extended Authorship, for University of New Mexico Press. He is currently working on a book about the mixed legacy of wartime cryptography on theories of communication, postmodern theory, neurodiversity, and current debates about the role of internet platform corporations. He will be giving a paper on this theme at the forthcoming BSLS conference in April. A prose text called “Unknowns” will appear in the Chicago Review in March.

My current research includes two major new scholarly book projects: Indigenous Thought and the Invention of the World System and In the Debt Colony: A History of Colonial Debt. I have recently edited a special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (with Ranka Primorac), and completed a chapter on ‘Colonial Violence, Law, and Justice in Egypt’ for a major new collection of essays on The Postcolonial Middle East, edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. I have published books on States of Emergency in colonial and postcolonial literatures and law; the fiction of Salman Rushdie; and the postcolonial thought and criticism of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I have also co-edited Terror and the Postcolonial (with Elleke Boehmer); Foucault in an Age of Terror (with Stephen Bygrave); and a special issue of the journal New Formations on Hannah Arendt after Modernity (with Devorah Baum and Stephen Bygrave).

I am a playwright and screenwriter writing scripts for stage, television, film, and radio. I am very interested in social issues and finding ways to bring these into drama and into ‘genre’ pieces. I often work with marginalised communities and artists as part of my process – for example, I’m currently working with an actor with learning disabilities on a television piece, and prisoners for a theatre piece. I’m interested in how we can bring unheard voices and unseen people to mainstream audiences. A large amount of my work to date has been for teenagers and young audiences. In Spring 2018, my play KeepyUppy,written for the World Cup for ages 3+, toured the UK. My play, Consensual, is being remounted by NYT at Soho Theatre; performances begin 22nd October. Orange Polar Bear, my bilingual play co-written with Korean writer Sun Duck Ko, premieres in Seoul at the National Theatre Company of Korea in October before transferring to Birmingham REP in November.

I am interested in Africa’s literatures and cultures. This sometimes involves looking at the effects of postcolonial politics on everyday lives and all kinds of writing: Zimbabwe’s Mugabe looms large in my 2006 book on that country’s novels. But more than that, I want to understand how Africa’s fictions have participated in producing new kinds of beauty and pleasure, in giving meaning to their readers’ understanding of space and time, and in surviving and resisting many kinds of crisis and oppression. Sometimes, I have found, this kind of questioning leads to other questions, about the nature and meaning of ‘literature’ itself.

I have an interdisciplinary art practice and am interested in the production of writing and its modes of delivery in the forms of text, image, sound, video and performance. I am particularly interested in combining narrative, visual and symbolic language systems, subject-specific, often scientific, terminologies, and field-based writing as a means to explore concepts of geographical, temporal and emotional distance